I must say that I feel like I've been lied to by my Hollywood thrillers. Here we have a case in which hundreds of billions of dollars and the leadership of a great power are at stake. In a movie, there would have been a superbly engineered conspiracy countered by brilliant agents on the other side.

But, as far as I can tell, every single real person involved in this story acted like a complete idiot with a time horizon of about 90 seconds to 90 minutes. I've seen shoving matches in an alley between a homeless guy and a transvestite streetwalker that involved more careful planning than this.